Colonial Australia
A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove by Thomas Watling, 1794
Terra Australis Incognita (unknown southern land)
The first recorded ship to chart the
Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal
people was the Duyfken (Little Dove) in
1606.
Captained by Willem Janszoon and built in
the Netherlands in 1595 the ship was just
20 metres from stem to stern, and 6
metres across the beam, with a draught
(the depth of water it needed to float in)
of only 2.45 metres.
Duyfken (Little Dove) replica
Abel Tasman - 1642 voyage
VOC Captain Abel Tasman charted parts of the north, west, and southern
coasts of Australia which was then known as New Holland.
New Holland
James Cook
In 1770 the Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook
charted the Australian east coast in his ship HM
Barque Endeavour
Cook claimed the east coast for King George III of
England on 22nd August 1770, at Possession Island.
This new territory was named 'New South Wales‘
Captain Cook Memorial
Museum, Whitby
The ‘First Fleet’ 1788
Captain Arthur Phillip
New South Wales
The First Fleet, comprising 11 ships and around 1,350 people, arrived at Botany Bay
between 18th and 20th January 1788. The area was deemed to be unsuitable for
settlement and they moved north to Port Jackson on 26th January 1788
Matthew Flinders
The process of British colonisation of Western Australia
began in 1791 when George Vancouver claimed the
Albany region in the name of King George III.
Matthew Flinders was the first person to circumnavigate
the continent 1801-1803
He named it Terra Australis or 'Australia’
The name Australia was adopted for the continent in 1817
Modern Australia
Archaeology in Australia
• Prehistoric Archaeology (the archaeology of Aboriginal peoples
from c. 50,000 before present to AD 1788)
• Historical Archaeology (the archaeology of Australia after
permanent European Settlement in 1788)
• Maritime Archaeology
• In practice these categories often overlap within Cultural
Heritage Management, which encompasses Aboriginal, Historical
and Maritime sites
http://www.asha.org.au/
The Australian Society for Historical
Archaeology was founded in 1970
to promote the study of historical
archaeology in Australia.
In 1991 the Society was extended
to include New Zealand and the
Asia-Pacific region generally, and
its name was changed to the
Australasian Society for Historical
Archaeology
1970s Historical Archaeology
Early European settlements
• Port Essington – Northern Territory
• Corinella – Victoria
Homesteads
• Elizabeth farm - NSW
• Old Saumarez Station – NSW
Industrial sites
• James King’s pottery – NSW
• Fossil beach cement work – Victoria
Aboriginal sites
• Whybalenna, Tasmania
The Archaeology of Convicts
161,000 convicts transported
between 1788- 1867
Up until 1840 most buildings, roads,
bridges built by convicts
By the mid-1830s only around 6 per
cent of the convict population were
'locked up‘
The majority of convicts worked on
projects for free settlers and the
authorities around the nation
Archaeology of convict-built structures
Sydney
The First Government House, Sydney
Rural New South Wales
Great North Road
Tasmania
Port Arthur
The First Government House, Sydney, 1789-1846
On 4th June 1789, just sixteen months after the
first landing at Sydney Cove, the early settlers
gathered to celebrate the birthday of King
George III and the grand opening of Government
House
The building was designed and built by the convict brick-maker James Bloodsworth.
The use of brick was initially limited because of the shortage of lime, a
key ingredient in making mortar. Archaeologists have discovered that the lime used
in the first Government House was made from oyster shells.
Government House was used for 57 years before the old building was demolished
The Great North Road
The Great North Road was built by convict labour , often working in irons, between
1826 and 1836 to connect Sydney with Newcastle and the Upper Hunter Valley in
NSW
Much of this engineering master piece still exists and in parts still carries traffic
Great North Road
Grace Karskens University of New South Wales,
Sydney
By juxtaposing the location of different styles of surviving stonework with the
known distribution of Road Gangs between 1827 and 1832, she found that a
pattern of association between certain gangs and particular styles emerged. The
Gangs appear to have been organised according to skills and the difficulty of
terrain
Port Arthur
Port Arthur’s Separate Prison was closely modelled on Pentonville and was known as
the Model Prison. It was built in 1849–50 with three wings of cells and a fourth
wing containing a chapel
Female Factories
• 20 per cent of the first convicts were women
• Women were typically sentenced for periods of 7 or 14 years, usually for
petty theft from their employers in England
• The ‘female factories’ were originally profit-making textile factories
Ross Female Factory, Tasmania
Female convicts were transported to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen's Land)
from 1803, when the colony was founded, to 1853
The Ross Female Factory operated towards the end of the transportation period
from March 1848 until November 1854.
It served as a factory as well as hiring depot, an overnight station for female
convicts travelling between settlements, a lying-in hospital and a nursery.
Ross Female Factory, Tasmania
Eleanor Casella
University of Manchester
Solitary cells
Ross Female Factory, Tasmania
Networks of underground exchange subverted the controlled institutional
landscape
Highest frequency and density of illicit artefacts (tobacco and alcohol related) and
buttons (for exchange) found in Solitary Cells
“While under solitary sentence, the factory ‘incorrigibles’ continued to maintain
their access to forbidden indulgences, relieving the monotonous boredom, cold,
and hunger of disciplinary confinement with a pipe and a bottle…”
Eleanor Casella
Landscapes of Punishment and Resistance p. 117
Gold mining from 1851
Dolly’s Creek, Victoria
Dolly’s Creek: A Goldfield Community in Victoria
Susan Lawrence
La Trobe University Melbourne
Excavation of a miners frame tent encampment occupied from late-1850s to
1890s
“homes where women seem to have lived had most elaborate
assemblages…transfer-patterned tablewares…glass cake stands…floral wall
paper…pipe-clay whitened chimneys with mantel piece and brass clock”
Suggests that everyone – male and female - preferred to eat and drink from
ceramic plates and cups, but the tents with women seemed more intent on
pursuing the 19th century ideology of respectability
A gold miner’s tent
The clock house
The chimney house
The Rocks, Sydney
The Rocks, Sydney (Grace Karskens, again)
Convicts and ex-convicts attempted to refine their behaviour and
eating habits
The 700 wooden bowls and platters sent with the First Fleet were
quickly replaced with decorative ceramics
Not much elaborate tableware prior to 1810, but after that date gravy
boats, milk jugs, sugar bowls and other fancy settings introduced
Drinking however belonged to an older realm of behaviour and the
habit of passing a bottle or decanter around or drinking from a
shared ‘circling glass’ (?an Irish habit) persisted into the 19th century
Lake Innes: Port Macquarie NSW
‘Privilege and servitude’ revealed in archaeological residues.
Lake Innes Estate flourished in the 1830s, declined during the 1840s.
In its heyday viability was based on the labour of transported convicts, but
paid free workers were also employed.
A complex social hierarchy, at the top of which were the residents of Lake
Innes House: family members and friends of Major Archibald Clunes Innes,
a retired British army officer who created a colonial version of the landed
estate that fate had denied him in his native Scotland
Material Culture and Consumer Society:
Dependent Colonies in Colonial Australia
Mark Staniforth, Flinders University, Adelaide
Research on shipwrecks from the Matthew James (1841) in 1974 to the Sydney
Cove (1797) in 1994 led Staniforth to conclude that British imported goods were
vital to the successful colonization of Australia for more than purely economic
reasons:
• to distinguish the colonists from indigenous groups
• to reassure the colonists about their place in the world
• to help establish the colonists’ own networks of social relations
Challenging the ‘Great Australian Silence’
The phrase ‘Great Australian Silence’ was coined by W.E.H. Stanner an
anthropologist in 1968
19th century conceptions of Aboriginal society portrayed it as static and
primitive; the bottom rung of the ladder of civilization with Europeans at the top
This view was perpetuated by archaeology and anthropology, which searched
for the ‘primitive’ and used structural-functionalist models to give a static
impression of Aboriginal culture
Even well-meaning attempts to preserve ‘disappearing’ Aboriginal cultures
served to imply they were the primitive ‘deep foundations’ of the new nation
Governor Davey's [sic]
.
Proclamation to
the Aborigines,
1816
Painting - oil painting on pine board
Incorrectly labelled as "Governor
Davey's Proclamation to the
Aborigines"
Actually Lieutenant-Governor George
Arthur's proclamation of c.1828-1830
Attempted Genocide
Aboriginal Resistance
Truganini was a negotiator and spokesperson
for her people.
Her mother had been killed by whalers, her
uncle had been shot by a soldier and three of
her sisters had been abducted and sold to
sealers. Her betrothed, Paraweena, was
drowned in the Channel by timber sawyers.
In 1838, Truganini was part of a guerilla war
campaign at Port Philip, Victoria with a group of
other Tasmanian Aborigines.
The men were executed in Melbourne's first
public execution. Truganini returned to
Wybaleena in 1842.
Truganini 1812-1876
Truganini died in 1876.
Her skeleton was displayed at the Tasmanian
Museum until 1947.
In 1976 her remains were cremated and
scattered according to her wishes.
Samples of her skin and hair were finally
returned from the British College of Surgeons in
2002.
A shell necklace attributed to Truganini was
found in a southern England museum in 2001.
Rodney Harrison & Christine Williamson
The first book length historical archaeology of Aboriginal Australia and its
application in researching the shared history of Aboriginal and settler
Australians.
Kimberley Points
Traditionally, Kimberley points were made from a variety of
fine-grained stone and ranged from approximately 1 - 8 cm in
length.
Aboriginal toolmakers found that glass and ceramic, including
ceramic telegraph line insulators, were very well suited to the
production of Kimberley points
Increased demand - from both Aboriginal exchange networks
and an emergent 'tourist' trade with non-Aboriginal people
led to the refinement of techniques and their size.
Finished glass points up to 20 cm long have been found.
Landscape studies
From the late 1980s – Aboriginal-European interaction has been explored in
“frontier” zones
Participation on the cattle industry offered Aboriginal people a means to
remain in traditional country in co-existence with settlers, and maintaining
their kin relations
Large scale landscape level studies attempted by prehistorians; in Arnhem
land, northern Australia, Aboriginal people gravitated toward European
populations centres and became sedentary
Other studies have explored how access to traditional sites was cut off
following colonization, or changed in sites that lay “beyond the imperial net”
New studies
In south east Australia most Aboriginals confined to reserves from the 1860s.
Daily life and experience from that time can be found and studied in these places,
challenging the accounts of missionaries, etc
Where archaeological representations once stressed the pastness and stasis
Aboriginal culture, they now foreground regional and temporal variation within
Aboriginal culture over the past 60,000 years, historicizing our understandings of
Aboriginality
Aboriginal archaeology
Tim Murray, La Trobe, Melbourne
The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies
CUP 2004
There is a need to reconcile shared histories with radically different conceptions of
time and culture, and to acknowledge the European arrival as an invasion – not a
neutral colonization of an empty land
This can be difficult; some Aboriginal peoples have adopted a “strategy of refusal”
rejecting European claims to speak on their behalf and efforts to construct
consensual narratives of the nation